Tom Curry walks into the boardroom at Sale’s training ground with a spring in his step. He sits down to give chapter and verse on his brush with retirement, the debilitating hip injury that required six-hour surgery and his gruelling recovery with an openness you would not always associate with one of rugby’s most intense operators. He soon speaks of the five stages of grief and, after 45 minutes in his company, it is clear that Curry has reached acceptance.
To recap, Curry was feeling discomfort in his hip towards the back end of England’s World Cup campaign last year. It did not take long after returning to Sale to discover that “something wasn’t right” and the subsequent scan delivered a prognosis that floored him. “I had a Zoom with the surgeon and he said you are probably going to retire,” says Curry, still just 26.
“I literally just cried. I curled up into a ball. I just couldn’t really process it. It was a surreal moment. But you just have to go through those raw emotions then process it all. My biggest thing – the hardest bit – was getting to the surgery. I had three weeks until the surgery and I couldn’t really do anything. You are limping around, you have retirement in your head and you’re being useless to everyone.”
The road to recovery was a slog and went via Loughborough where Curry had to “learn to run again” before he could even think about returning to the field. “It’s the day-to-day stuff, like being able to go for a dog walk and not limping. That’s the big relief, those small tasks, because I was almost getting into a habit of limping. The biggest physical barrier was just to get running again and almost walking, just to get off the crutches, trusting your hip.
“I tried to get back running, did partial weight-bearing, walking, all the rehab stuff, and then I tried to run and I couldn’t. That was a really tough period but once I got to Loughborough it genuinely taught me to run again. And that’s when the relief came. I saw the surgeon again, he said: ‘My biggest worry was getting you back, this conversation is how we can make you better as a rugby player.’”
Curry eventually fought his way back to appear in Sale’s last match of the season against Bath, before he was taken on tour with England, coming off the bench in all three Tests. Against Bath, shortly after being introduced to the field he made a thunderous tackle on Josh Bayliss, 110kg of catharsis launched into the Scotland flanker’s ribs. “You get so pent up,” Curry says. “You are just like: ‘Let me just go.’”
The irony of Curry’s plight is that the same all-or-nothing attitude which got him into trouble ultimately dug him out of it. He and Sam Underhill were dubbed the “Kamikaze Kids” by Eddie Jones because “they’ve got no care for their bodies”. Whether it be in the gym, on the training field or in thick of things on the pitch, Curry has always pushed himself to the limit and beyond. He has often struck as someone who knows no other way and he speaks of a newfound maturity in having to recalibrate his approach.
“You have to drop a lot of ego,” he says. As his Sale director of rugby Alex Sanderson puts it: “Due to his personality, pushing the boat out too far in every session and every game, his ability to go after everything with everything he’s got was to some degree breaking his body apart. He’s had to come to that acceptance and understanding while he’s been rehabbing and looking at the rest of his career. I’ve enjoyed that with him, he’s matured as a person.”
Listen to Curry’s dedication to rehab, however, and his single-mindedness is the reason he has made a successful return. “I don’t understand when people say: ‘I gained a hobby when I was injured, I learned something.’ Honestly I couldn’t think of anything worse. I’d be playing the piano and thinking: ‘Why is that benefiting my hip?’ There wasn’t anything where I thought: ‘I’m going to learn this.’ I was just so obsessed with my hip. My Instagram page, it’s meant to be quite a fun app, it was just hip exercises. I didn’t need to switch off. I went to Malta for three or four days and I was doing my hip stuff there. I didn’t want to switch off. What’s the point of switching off?”
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Curry candidly admits he will have to undergo hip surgery again at some stage in the future. Sale estimate in the next two years if he continues to show the kind of disregard for his body that he used to, but the hope is that he will, as he says, work smarter not harder. “I will need surgery at some point,” Curry says. “I’m 26 now, until when I die, there will be another surgery. I don’t know when that’s going to be, we’ll just have to see.”
He will have to be micromanaged through the season and, should he be offered an enhanced contract by Steve Borthwick, he will be the first real stress test of the Professional Game Partnership. He would love to play a leading role for England this autumn, in particular, you suspect, against South Africa – he laughs and quickly moves on when asked if he would shake hands with Bongi Mbonambi – as well as on what would be a second British & Irish Lions tour in the summer. But Curry knows better than to look that far ahead.
He has a contentment to him, happy to stay present, not wound nearly as tight as he could be. “It definitely matures you. I just want to live out my career and see what that is. There’s that epiphany moment for everyone and I’m lucky that I’ve had mine slightly earlier.”
